Over the past week or so I have had no less than a dozen people ask me the same question, “how do you find out about stuff?” One of the things that I preach to my staff at Topspin is to never answer a question for one person. Chances are if someone asks you a question, there are others who probably want to know the answer as well. Now it’s time for me to take my own advice.

The short answer is, I don’t find good stuff. I follow other people that find good stuff.

The important thing is that the good stuff is almost always pushed to me, which means I don’t spend nearly as much time as other people pulling the stuff. It’s an important distinction and it allows me to be on top of good stuff without a lot of effort. I could be a lot better about sharing stuff and I’ve recently employed Buffer to help with that.

Here’s how I do it:

I get daily emails that pull popular links from people I follow via Curate.me or News.me.

I subscribe to a lot of RSS feeds via Google Reader, though I never actually use Google Reader. I use the excellent Reeder app on my Mac and iOS devices. Worth the small price. Here’s a direct download to my OPML file, which you can import into your own Google Reader account.

Follow smart people on Twitter and Tumblr. Follow the tastemakers and smartest people in your industry in both applications and check out the people that they follow. Services like Curate.me and News.me will work a lot better and help you cut through the noise.

Finally, make sure you’re not just pulling all the time. Push to your networks as well and let people know about the awesome stuff you find. Chances are you have an audience that knows less than you do and wants to know more.

While I haven’t discovered (at least that I have kept track of) the same number of songs, 2011 proved to be an incredible year for music discovery. Tumblr, exfm and Soundcloud have been central to that. It just needs to be easier to keep track of in 2012.